Great Sunsets

One of the great pleasures of working in a town that is next to the sea is seeing great sunsets. Our work usually finishes at about 6.00 pm and when we look out the windows, we are greeted by the beautiful scene of the sun going down in the midst of the boats that are tied to the mini harbor near to the office

This shot I took after the sun was settling down in the horizon. The boats have returned to the harbor and the day seems to be settling in for the night. Even though we were tired but after seeing the sunset, we were rejuvenated with fresh energy and continued with our work.

Mother nature is truly great!

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Attack of the TV Serials

(Day 8 in Dubai)

After I almost managed to “extinguish” them back in Malaysia, the Tamil TV Serials is coming a comeback in a huge way in Sharjah.

Almost on the first day we arrived in Sharjah from Dubai, we almost immediately checked the channels on our TV. There were almost 7 channels of TV Serials from the various part of India and there was no English channel (there was 3 other Arabic channels though). Then strange things started to happen. With no other channels for me to turn to, I started to get hooked to the Tamil Serials. This was crazy but luckily I managed to snap out from the Serial’s “hypnotism”. I slapped myself on the face several times and to be sure, even pinch hard on my wrist. This was getting weird. It was a nightmare.

However, TV Serials have not won the battle yet – for we got busy with work and started to work late and return to the hotel late. Sometimes we take our dinners late and by the time we reach the hotel, we take a quick shower and hit the bed, dozing off within minutes.

There is no time for serials – Thank God!

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I am offline

(Day 6 in Dubai)

This post is typed and uploaded in a small cyber cafe in Sharjah. It was done in a hurry and in the midst of Indians and Pakistanis (is this correct?) who are using the Internet to call back home and download Indian actresses photos.

I said “typed” because I have drafted my long post but when I tried open the file from thumb drive, it is corrupted. So, probably I need to re-copy it and try to upload it again tomorrow or the day after.

In the meantime…have a look at the something I spotted in Sharjah. Does this look very familiar? This was erected in the middle of the desert and near a major shopping mall.

The Internet connection at the new office in Sharjah is still not up…probably this Friday, we should be able to connect the outside world. I have about 400++ photos in my “database” and it still continues to grow. But without Internet connection, it is tough to do anything. Our work is a bit hampered with this problem – we are unable to download files from the office. We tried using the cyber cafe but the line here is simply crawling.

The view from the new office is great though…whenever we are feeling boring or want to take a quick break, we just look down and rewarded with a great sight of the working in the nearby port.

There is more photos taken on the loading and unloading on the ships taken from the office above. Will upload it once the Internet is up.

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Music – my lifeline!

(Day 5 in Dubai)

It was noisy and it was getting on our nerves!

We are sitting the same room where we have temporarily placed 2 mega servers for installation, debugging and testing. They are noisy (because we had taken them out from the rack) and used to be hot as well. Hot until we decided to open the windows and immediately the room was engulfed with “pure natural air conditioner” from the outside. Yes, we took care of the heat and that was too easy but unfortunately not the sound. The sound had a profound effect on our ability to concentrate the work at hand – we were easily distracted and started to have a headache.

We were at lost on what to do next. We could not leave the room (the best place to do work) and certainly could not shut down the server. We looked around and noticed that the system engineers from India were doing their work with a headphone on their ears. They were listening to songs whilst doing some serious coding. Ya, occasionally they were singing as well. Hmmm, a headphone – that might just do the trick. I have brought in an old headphone but it was not in good shape (the sponge was loose and was coming out). The built-in microphone was also getting on my way. So, when I had the chance to visit the Mall of the Emirates couple days ago, one of the first thing I did was to go into Carrefour and get myself a decent headphone. It cost me about 20 Dhr – cheap (didn’t I say it was based on Dubai standard!) but stylish.

The next day, it was more peaceful…

The server was still at its noisy pace but this time, I had my new “sparkling” headphone which muted the outside noise and put the force behind light listening of music. I was able to concentrate on work more and at the same time, eased my work stress with the right doses of Shankar Mahadevan, pumping away good old Hindi and Tamil beats. Occasionally Richard Marx, Josh Groban and Robbie Williams will be entertaining me whilst I am testing out the system here.

Reality checks in once I take off the headphone but it does not matter much. I can always put back the headphone and cut down on the noise. Things should be improving in the next few days when the servers are placed back into their place in a secured server room (far, far away from us) and we will be using a more proper place in Sharjah for implementation.

By the way, I have been listening to Tamil songs most of the time and I am beginning to appreciate Vidyasagar’s talent in composing songs. Brilliant if one listens closely – one good example is the song “Poovukellam” from the movie “Uyiroda Uyiraga” (hear the guitar tune at the start and you will know what I mean. Yes, I know Ajith cannot mimic playing the guitar well, damn too obvious in the video).

Back to my headphone now.

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Dubai Glorious Food

(Day 4 in Dubai)

When it comes to me trying to be funny and decided to lose weight, my wife is always right in her forecast.

I mentioned to her before leaving for Dubai that I would probably be so busy with work that I may have less time to be eating. In that way, I probably can lose weight. She looked at me, laughed and in the end, her response was that “me in Dubai losing weight” was a rather impossible thing to do. And yes, she was right after all. With good choices of food for our spoil, it was really difficult to keep away from having good food almost every time of the day.

We been having a rather heavy Indian food for the last 4 days especially having various types of briyani (mutton, chicken and fish). It was not so oily or laced with extra ghee unlike the briyanis back in Malaysia.

If that was not enough, our breakfast in 2 days has been masala thosai instead of the light weight regular thosai. Add that with tea and coffee in betweens and that adds more to the type of heavy stuff that we been taking. What else we could do? It is either the heavy Indian food or the heavy cholesterol high fast food. At least, the heavy Indian food was closer to home with mango pickles, sambar and vegetables.

We went to Malabar restaurant 2 days ago on our way back from work. After ordering our drinks, we had a look at the menu – there was the usuals with various types curry, vegetables and chicken dishes. I opted for chicken pepper curry with plain rice. It has all the spices blended into one hot peppered curry. It was good for I was sweating for the first time after arriving in Dubai (with temperature of 24′C for the last 4 days). Finally my tongue had found the taste that it was used to have back home. The food was cheap too – it cost about 24 Dhr (In Dubai, that is cheap although the briyani that we sometimes order for lunch is only 7 Dhr)

Yesterday, we decided on something else – it was late when we finally decided to call it a day at the workplace. So the best choice was a quick bite at one of the fast food joints near our hotel. We were walking towards the joint when we noticed a seafood restaurant which looked like a high class restaurant. The place looked good and clean and the various types seafood was displayed prominently on the main counter. We decided to check it out – we entered in and wanted to see the menu (and the price). When we got it, we were surprised that it was cheaper than what we will be paying for our meal in a fast food joint. So, we decided there and then that we will have seafood for tonight’s dinner. I opted for chicken in garlic sauce and sweet & sour vegetables to go with the egg fried rice. Added with a soft drink and soup of the day, it only cost me about 20 Dhr in total.

The fast food joints in Dubai is expensive. We had KFC on the first night we were in Dubai and it cost us about 20 Dhr for a skinny looking, oily chicken, salad that tasted very raw and that too was not that tasty – spicy chicken that was not that spicy. Talking about being spicy, the thing that we noticed in the restaurants in Dubai is that they don’t serve chilly sauce. There is the tomato sauce and sometimes some Tobasco sauce but never a proper chilly sauce. This frustrated my colleagues so much that we actually went to the Carrefour in Emirates Mall to buy a proper chilly sauce. I guess it must a Malaysian thing to do because we also noticed that the sauce that we purchased was actually manufactured in Malaysia.

Ya, Malaysia boleh! Damn, what’s wrong with we, Malaysians – any fried food without chilly sauce in our mind is going against the law of nature. I am missing the chilly sauce too - ha ha.

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